Risky Business: Who is Mick Grove?

Mick Grove

Mick Grove uses his powers for good. As a skilled hacker, he is able to discover flaws in even the most secure systems. Graduating from Iowa State University in 2003, Mick quickly rose in the security field with successful careers at Wells Fargo, and Amazon before moving into his current position as Senior Security Engineer of Gravity Payments. At Wells Fargo and Amazon, Mick performed source code reviews of new software, as well as performing comprehensive penetration tests against new technologies and configurations; including network hardware, operating systems (Windows, iOS, Android, Linux), wireless technologies, software applications, disk encryption, web services, and more. One important aspect of Mick’s skill set is his ability to break technical topics down into understandable language and actions. While at Amazon, Mick regularly met with internal software development teams and provided guidance and training on how to spot security flaws and how to write their software to be as secure as possible.

For someone as highly skilled as Mick, it is straightforward for him to identify and fix flaws, but it takes a skilled communicator to be able to explain it to everyday people.

We had our resident interviewer sit down with Mick to gain his expert opinion on what actions business owners and individuals can take today to make their information more secure. To start off this series on business security, we wanted to first learn a bit about Mick Grove.

Who is Mick Grove: Video Interview

Interview Full Transcript:

Dan Carroll: I am here talking Small Business Security with Mick Grove. So tell me about yourself, what do you do here (Gravity Payments)

Mick Grove: I am the Senior Security Engineer here at Gravity, my main role is working in Application Security. So I am teaching the developers here at Gravity about secure coding. I look through the code here to find security flaws. Generally how to do things from a software standpoint the right way, in terms of security.

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Dan Carroll: So that sounds really boring and tedious. Is it?

Mick Grove: It is very tedious, kind of like if you’re a puzzle type person you might like this kind of work.

Dan Carroll: But you are doing like backward puzzles.

Mick Grove: Exactly. So Gravity creates a finished product and then I take it apart to see if there’s flaws.

Dan Carroll: I hate puzzles because to me a puzzle is just a person who is saying, “Hey I took this picture and I smashed it into a thousand pieces, now you put it back together.”

Mick Grove: Yea, it’s a little bit like that.

Dan Carroll: So that’s what you do?

Mick Grove: I get to do the smashing.

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This post is part of our “Risky Business” series on online security tips for businesses.

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